Many modern computer systems, such as through an operating system running on a computer system, provide for the capturing of audio from an input device (e.g., a microphone or other analog or digital input source) and rendering of audio to an output device (e.g., a speaker, headphone jack, or other analog or digital output, including output to a network). Typical computer systems allow for concurrent access to an audio system by multiple applications or processes. For example, a user may be simultaneously listening to music (e.g., from a file or using a streaming application), playing a computer game, having a conversation (e.g., using voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) software), using a web browser to browse web pages having audio content, and streaming audio and/or video (e.g., “gamecasting”).
During operation, the audio system may experience performance issues. For example, calls to the audio system may hang or become deadlocked, may have prolonged execution times, or may return errors. These performance issues can result from coding errors, or bugs, in the audio service itself, in the drivers for audio endpoints, including hardware audio devices or other rendering or capture endpoints, or in the code for the application calling the audio system. Performance issues can have other sources. For example, if the audio system does not employ a suitable resource management scheme, multiple requests for the same resource (e.g., a buffer or audio endpoint) may result in a deadlock.
Typically, when a performance issue arises, the performance of the audio system is degraded. A user may choose to ignore the performance issue, or may try to take corrective actions. For example, a user may try to restart a particular application, or the computer system itself. Users with more technical expertise might try to reset or restart the audio service, or an audio endpoint. However, many users lack the technical expertise to appropriately diagnose and correct audio system errors, other than by restarting programs or the computer system. The audio system might not provide, or might not provide in an easily obtainable and interpretable format, information that could be used to diagnose the source of performance issues. Any of the corrective actions a user may take are typically time consuming, disruptive, and frustrating. In addition, it may be some time before a user realizes that there is a performance issue with the audio system.